An Outtake From the Ideological Origins of The American Revolution

by John R. Keene

Origins
In January 1754, Mary, a young Negro
servant to Isaac Wantone, wealthy farmer and patriot of the town
of Roxbury, Massachusetts, gave birth in her master’s stables
to a male child. An older Negro servant, named Lacy, also belonging
to Wantone’s retinue, attended Mary in her prolonged and exacting
labor, during which the slave girl developed an intense fever. For
a half-hour after Mary delivered the child, a tempest raged within
her as she lay screaming in a strange tongue, which was in part
her native Akan. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she expired.
Lacy uttered a benediction in that same language, and thereafter
presented the infant to her master, Mr. Wantone, as was the custom
in those parts. When he saw the copper-skinned, ember-eyed newborn,
upon whom the darkness of Africa had not completely left its indelible
stamp, the master, adequately versed in the Scriptures, promptly
named him Zion, which in Hebrew means “sun.”

Knowing his servant to have been unmarried at the time of the child’s
birth, Wantone rightly feared the sanctions laid down by Puritan
and colonial law, which in the case of illegitimate paternity included
whippings, fines rendered against the mother of the child, its father,
and quite probably the master, be he same or otherwise. Wantone
also might have to put in an appearance before the General Court.
Though not a gentleman by birth (he was of yeoman stock and self-read
in the classics), Wantone had fought admirably among his fellows
in King George’s War and had by dint of many years’
toil built up an excellent estate. Moreover, he subscribed unwaveringly
to the Congregational Church, and on all these accounts declined
to have his reputation or standing in the slightest besmirched by
such a scandal. He had therefore conspired to conceal Mary’s
condition for the full length of her term by keeping her indoors
as much as possible and forbidding her to venture out near the local
roads, where she might be spied by neighbors or passersby. He also
forbade his servants and children to speak of the matter, lest their
gossip betray him. Toward neither plan did he meet with rebellion;
so it is said that one’s sense of the law, like one’s
concept of morality, originates in the home. The child’s father,
whose name the taciturn girl had refused to speak, Wantone identified
as Zephyr, a sly horsebreaking black-Abenaki horsebreaker in the
service of his neighbor, Josiah Shapely. Among the members of his
own household, however, he himself was not entirely above suspicion,
especially given the child’s complexion. In any case, Zion
would, according to plan, officially be deemed a foundling.

Wantone’s wife, née Comfort and descended
from an unbroken line of Berkshire Puritans who had arrived in the
Bay Colony not long after the Mayflower, had for several years been
growing ever more austere in her faith, toward the achievement of
a glacial purity of relations. As a result she abhorred all spiritual
and fleshly transgressions, especially bastardy, in which the two
were so visibly commingled. Upon learning of the infant’s
imminent entry into the sphere of her family's existence, she ordered
that it be kept out of her sight altogether.

Music
When Lacy had first passed the infant Zion to her master for inspection,
the child began to cry uncontrollably. Wantone ordered him to be
placed in a small wooden crib on the second floor of the house above
the buttery: thereby he might learn peace. This weeping, which soon
became a kind of keening, persisted for several weeks without relent.
Meanwhile Wantone ordered his slaves Jubal, a native-born Negro
who tended his livestock, and Axum, a young mulatto of New Hampshire
origin who served as his handyman, to bury the deceased slave girl
Mary near the edge of his south grazing fields. At her interment,
the master recited over the grave a few lines from the Old Testament,
and wept.

Lacy was nearing middle age, yet this chain of events soon bound
her into assuming the role of the child’s mother. Otherwise
she was engaged in her innumerable chores about the house, or attending
to her mistress, Mrs. Wantone, who did not like ever to be kept
waiting. Lacy had not seen her own child since shortly after his
sixth birthday nearly fifteen years before, because her previous
master, then ill with cancer and disposing of his Boston estate,
had sold the boy north to a merchant in Newbury, and her south to
Wantone. During her frequent breaks, she nursed the infant Zion
from a suckling bottle, on warm goat's milk sweetened with honey
and dashes of rum, of which there was no shortage in the cellar.
She also sang to him the lively songs she remembered from her childhood
along the lower Volta, in the Gold Coast, as well as Christian hymns
when any member of the family, especially her mistress, was in earshot.
Eventually the child calmed down appreciably, and Wantone allowed
him to be carried about the entire house and grounds when the mistress
was away.

Though these were years of increasing privation for many in the
Colony as the noose of the mother country tightened, Wantone prospered.
Not long after this time he purchased a likely young Negro woman,
named Mary, for £11 from the Boston trader Nicholas
Marshall, to replace the deceased Mary, who had attended primarily
to the four Wantone children, Nathanael, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Hepzibah.
New Mary was also expected to afford Lacy more time for Mrs. Wantone
by watching Zion. This became the only task to which she took with
even a passing enthusiasm. She had been born in the region of the
Gambia, where all were free, and quickly chafed under the weight
of her new status. She ignored orders; she talked back. Moreover
she was given to spreading rumors and painting her face and fingers
gaily with Roxbury clay and indigo on the Sabbath, while declining
to recite the Lord’s prayers, as well as to other acts of
idleness, gossip, lewdness, and truculence. For these offenses,
to which the boy was a constant witness, she was routinely whipped
by her mistress, who took a firm and iron hand at all times. Naturally,
New Mary ran away, to Brookline, where she was captured by the local
constabulary, and returned bound to the Wantones. She received ten
lashes for her impertinence, another ten for her flight, still a
third ten for cursing her mistress before the other slaves, and
an interdiction not to leave the near grounds of the estate under
any circumstances. One can only temporarily keep a wild horse penned.
For several years, as the child Zion was nearing the age of his
autonomy (seven), New Mary endured these constraints, peaceably
rearing the child with Lacy and the several Negro male servants,
Jubal, Axum, and Quabina. And then she ran away again, this time
getting as far south as Stoughton, on the Neponsit River. Again
she was returned, duly punished, ordered to comport herself with
the dignity befitting the Wantone household. Repeated incidents
of insolence and misbehavior followed, however, including acts of
a lascivious nature with a local Indian, the destruction of several
volumes of books, and an attempted fire. The Wantones sold New Mary
to a Plymouth candlemaker for £4. Zion was, for nearly
a year, inconsolable.

Even during New Mary’s tenure Zion had often shown signs of
melancholy or unprovoked anger. Frequently sullen, he would often
sequester himself in the buttery, or at the edge of the manor house’s
Chinese porch, singing to himself lyrics improvised out of the air
or songs he had learned from Lacy and the other slaves. Or he would
declaim passages from the local gazette which Axum or the Wantone
children had taught him. At other times he would devise elaborate
counting games, to the amazement of the other slaves. When caught
in such idle pursuits on numerous occasions by Mrs. Wantone, who
spared no rod, he did not shed a tear. Her punishments instead appeared
only to inure him to discipline altogether. He began singing more
frequently, and would occasionally accompany his songs with taps
and foot-stamps. His master took a different tack, and hedgingly
encouraged the boy in his musical pursuits, so long as they did
not disturb the household or occur on the Sabbath. As a result the
idling musical sessions abated—temporarily. Even so, Mrs.
Wantone relinquished Zion’s correction to her husband and
eldest son.

As soon as Zion was able he began performing small tasks about the
house and estate, such as restuffing the mattress ticks, peeling
vegetables, replacing the bedpans, polishing his master’s
shoes, and feeding the geese. His intermittent disappearances and
musical-lyrical spells soon reappeared. At the age of ten, he entered
an apprenticeship to Jubal, and then at eleven to Ford, the Irishman
who oversaw the extensive Wantone holdings, which included twenty
acres of home lot, fifteen acres of mowing land, twelve and two
quarter acres fifteen rods of pasture land, twenty acres ten rods
undivided of salt marsh, ten acres of woodland and muddy pond woods
to the south, and six acres of woodland to the west, all in Roxbury
and Dorchester; as well as a plot of forty acres of woodland in
Cambridge, recently bequeathed by his late brother-in-law, Nathanael
Comfort, Esq., a graduate of Harvard College and a gentleman lawyer.
From Ford Zion learned a number of Irish melodies, which he performed
to the delight of all on Negro Election Day and other holidays.
During the late summer evenings, he would accompany a nearby slave
fiddler, and soon developed a name throughout the neighborhood as
a warbler.

One afternoon around the time of Zion’s thirteenth year Jubal
heard fiddling out near the cow barn. On investigation, he found
the boy creditably playing his master’s violin and singing
a sorrowful tune in accompaniment. The horses stood in their stables,
unbrushed. Because he liked the saturnine child, Jubal waited until
Zion had finished his performance. After reproaching him, Jubal
seized the violin and returned it to the music room. When he returned
to the barn, the boy was missing. Several weeks later Jubal again
found Zion playing the violin in the afternoon, when he should have
been at the chicken-coop feeding the hens; this time he threatened
to tell on the boy if he took the violin again, to which Zion only
laughed and dared Jubal to say anything. Jubal returned the violin
without incident. The third time Jubal encountered the boy fiddling
in the barn, he rebuked him vehemently, but before he could snatch
away the violin, Zion smashed it to smithereens on a trough. For
this, he eventually received stripes from both his master and his
master’s son, and a ban on singing of any sort. The boy’s
wild mood swings and moroseness waxed from this point, to the extent
that the other slaves, particularly Jubal, took care not to offend
him. Wantone himself remained unconcerned, as he was the master
of his manor, and an oak does not quiver before ivy.

Around the time of his fourteenth birthday, Zion, now so strapping
in build and mature in mien that he could almost pass for a man,
ran away for the first time. Absconding in the dead of night by
shimmying down a tree outside his window, he got as far as the town
of Dedham, some nine miles away. There he remained in the surrounding
woods undiscovered for a week, until his nightly ballads and lamentations
betrayed him to a local Indian, who reported the melodiousness of
the voice to the town sheriff. Returned to his master, Zion received
the following punishment: he was placed in stocks for a night, and
then confined to the near grounds of the estate, with the threat
that any further misdeeds could result in his being temporarily
remanded to the custody of the local authorities. Within a fortnight
the boy had run away again, this time with one of Wantone’s
personal effects, and a pillowbeer of food. A search of the surrounding
towns turned up no clue of him. As a result, Wantone was forced
to advertise in the local gazette for the return of his lawful property.

Flight
From the New England Weekly News Letter, June 18, 1768:

Ran away from his master Isaac Wantone gentleman of the country
town of Roxbury in Suffolk County, in Massachusetts Bay Colony,
a likely Negro boy aged fourteene years, named ZION, who wore
on him [an] old grey shirt homespun and pair of breeches of
the same cotton cloth, with shoes only, and a kerchief about
his head, carrying a silver watch, clever, who sings like a
nightingall: WHO shall take up said likely ZION and convey him
to his MASTER above said, or advise him so that he may have
him again shall be PAID for the SAME at the rate of £4
1s.

To Pennyman
Three months had advanced when the sheriff’s office of the
town of Monatomy, in Middlesex County, returned to the Wantones
the fugitive child, who had been arrested and detained on a series
of charges. These included, but were not limited to, breaking the
Negro curfew in Middlesex County, theft (of various small articles,
including watches and food), disturbance of the peace, brawling,
gambling and trickery at games of chance, dissembling about his
identity and provenance, and masquerading as a free person. Most
seriously the young slave had beaten up an Irish laborer outside
a public house in Waltham, and threatened the man’s life if
he reported the beating to the authorities, local or British. For
this series of offenses, which broke the patience of the Wantones,
the General Court of Middlesex County arraigned, tried and convicted
the slave, to the penalty of thirty-five stripes, and a fine of
£20, payable to the victims. After the boy received
his public lashes, his master settled the fine and issued an apology
for his slave’s behavior to the General Court, which was printed
in all the local papers. He then promptly flogged Zion himself before
restraining the boy in a stock behind the cow barn. During this
time, the Wantones considered their options, and agreed it would
be in their best interests to sell their intractable chattel, who,
they supposed, still had arson and murder waiting in his arsenal.
This they promptly did despite the rapidly deflating nature of the
local currency, for the sum of £5, to a distant relative
of Wantone’s, the merchant Jabez Pennyman, then living on
a small estate in the Dorchester Neck.

Pennyman, a widower and veteran, ran general provision shops in
Dorchester and Milton, the latter purchased at a sharp discount
from a Loyalist recently emigrated to Canada. A native of the Narraganset
Plantations, he had earned a reputation for probity in all matters
financial, and rectitude in all matters moral, and had acquired
Zion both because of the low cost and because he required the services
of a slave of considerable strength who could read English and reckon
figures. The menagerie of Pennyman’s home, the slave soon
learned, was utterly different from that of the Wantones. Instead
of sleeping in his master’s small house, his quarters now
consisted of a windowless, zinc-roofed shack, which might once have
been a toolshed, furnished only with a pallet bed and a rusted chamberpot,
several hundred yards away from the main edifice. His daily routine
also diverged markedly from that of his earlier life in Roxbury:
for Pennyman expected him to ride out with an assistant to one of
his shops six days a week, and spend the entire workday lifting,
lading, packing, unpacking, registering and moving stock, such as
apparel of all sorts, furniture, books, kitchenware, provisions,
yard and garden tools, and farm and estate implements. There were
no other Blacks, or even Indians, in Pennyman’s household;
only his Irish maid, Nellie, a Welsh manservant, James, and his
assistants in the shops, all boys of English or Yankee heritage,
none of whom showed the least inclination towards socializing with
a Negro. Unless the situation demanded it, in fact, none of them,
including Pennyman, spoke to him at all.

Although Zion worked commendably at his new post for almost six
months, without even the smallest infraction beyond the theft of
several bottles’ worth of Malden rum, the long rides, the
isolation and lack of companionship, his continued bondage, and
the lure of the nearby ocean had begun to affect him perniciously.
He especially bridled at Pennyman’s austerities: the provision
of a minimum of food, and no spices at all, at meals; a moratorium
on singing or celebrations of any kind, particularly during those
hours that he set aside to recount his ledger books or read the
Gospel; and the requirement of clothes of a plain nature especially
on holy days, for Pennyman had not been awakened by the preaching's
of Edwards or any other deliverer great or small. One morning, after
unloading cases of sugar, flour, molasses, pickles, vinegar, salt,
suet, cranberry bread, sweet currants, and apples, and casks of
rum, French brandy, Boston beer, and Madeira wine, Zion began singing
aloud one of the songs he had learned from New Mary to pass the
time, when he thought he overheard one of the shop assistants noting
how strange it was that “songs should arise from a shadow.”
Confronting the man, who peppered him with humiliating epithets,
Zion could no longer restrain himself and flattened the man with
one blow. A bullet, once fired, cannot be recalled: Fearing the
repercussions of his action, he fled on horse northwards to Boston,
tinderbox of liberty. After abandoning the horse in the marshlands
near Boston Neck, he ran northwards till he had reached the famed
Beacon Hill portion of the Tremountain. He concealed himself in
a stand of box until he could proceed down under cover of darkness
to the home of a cousin of Lacy who lived in Green Street, near
the Mill Pond. Here and at another safe house run by free blacks
he remained for several weeks, before shipping out without a permit
from Hatch’s Wharf on a clipper bound for Nantucket.

The sea momentarily opened a new chapter in the book of Zion’s
life. He set out on a Kittery-based sloop, the Hazard, which ventured
as far south as the English Caribbean, and on which he experienced
the freedoms and vicissitudes of the maritime life. Next came a
whaling tour, during which he served in a variety of capacities
for a year, enduring an ever-rising tide of depredations that culminated
in his being chained belowdecks, without food or water for weeks,
for theft, attempted mutiny, and insulting the honor of the whaler's
drunken captain. Only the intervention of a galley slave from the
Barbados, who held the captain’s affections, and most importantly,
brought him fresh water and salt cod at twilight, saved his life.

Liberty
The 1770s: great changes were blowing through streets of the colonial
capital. Britain had irrevocably stained Boston’s cobblestones
with the blood of Attucks and others; the promise of freedom sweetened
the air like incense. When Zion was freed by his captain upon return
to Sherburne, in Nantucket Island, instead of a duel to restore
his honor, the young man stowed away on a brigantine returning to
the port of Boston. Penniless; carrying on his person only a pocket
pistol and several cartouches he had stolen from the whaler captain’s
wares; and finding that both Lacy’s cousin and the safe woman
had moved or been moved from their residences, leaving no place
to stay, for the town appeared to his eyes to have evacuated its
entire black population, Zion grew restless and proceeded to rob
a tanner’s store. He was captured within hours by the British
authorities and confined, pending his arraignment, to the city prison
on Queen Street. After a short period of time, the under-magistrate
discovered that he was a fugitive slave, and returned him, pending
his trial, to Mr. Pennyman, now thriving handsomely with five shops
throughout Suffolk and Bristol Counties. Pennyman determined to
get rid of him. His personal scruples, however, did not permit him
to entertain simply manumitting the slave. He must first earn back
his investment.

Thus Pennyman ordered the slave to be flogged for his effrontery,
which to his preoccupied and rigid mind had assumed the character
of outright treachery. After Zion’s conviction and brief imprisonment,
he was returned to Pennyman, who sent him south to work in a shop
in Attleborough, far from the negative influence of the sea or Boston,
where the atmosphere fairly crackled with sedition. Zion—who
yearned either to take up residence in Halifax, which he had learned
about during his time at sea as a free man, and from there to ship
out on a frigate bound for parts unknown, or conversely to return
to the only settled home he had known, the Wantones, where he would
be again among those who knew him best—did not take kindly
to this turn of events, and revolted. After only a week, he fled
towards Boston, following the coastal route and getting as far as
Duxbury, where he stole two cakes of gingerbread, a package of biscuits,
and a pint of milk out of a horse-cart heading north. He secreted
himself in a nearby marsh. He was discovered a week later, arrested
and housed in a local jail. He swiftly broke out by eluding his
guard, commandeered a piebald, and headed south by southwest along
the lesser roads and trails. The local authorities again captured,
tried and imprisoned him, not only for his crimes but for his defiance
of the social order; yet his realization of his own personal power
had galvanized him, making life insufferable under any circumstances
but his own liberation.

During Zion’s second incarceration, Pennyman had quick-deeded
his ownership of the slave to a fellow merchant and reformed merchant,
Simon Warren, of Boston, who in return promised to pay full, rather
than wholesale, price for several cases of British liquor Pennyman
was trying to unload. Zion left jail in May of 1772, and for a brief
spell worked agreeably under Warren. Within the year, however, during
which the enslaved man resumed a life of debauchery, including but
not limited to periodic flights to Middlesex and lower Suffolk Counties,
fathering several children by white, Indian and Negro women, drunkenness
and brawling in the streets of Boston, celebrating on the Sabbath
day, breaking curfews, threatening shopkeepers, openly praising
the British government, and selling wine stolen from his master,
Warren found the situation so unbearable that he gave him to another
merchant, his second cousin, Job Hollis, of Boston.

Hollis, who had once held positions of prominence in the shipbuilding
trade in Marblehead, was now reduced to running a scrap metal-working
and trading shop on Lynn Street near the Hunt and White Shipyards.
Possessed of an increasingly liberal mindset, and realizing almost
immediately that he could only loosely control Zion, he afforded
his charge some berth by giving him traveling papers. With these
the slave immediately took the widest latitude, for had not the
Reverend Isaac Skillman preached in that very year that “the
slave should rebel against his master?” One midday he took
Hollis’s horse and a fiddle he had bought with some of his
earnings, and rode out to a cornhusking at Medford. Here his singing
and strumming, striking appearance, and lively manner at the husking
hall attracted the attentions of a number of the local women. The
one on whom he set his sights, however, was a married white lady
in her late 20’s, Ruth Pine, of obvious gentility. She coldly
rejected his serenades all afternoon. By the early evening, armed
with rum, he demanded that she accompany him back to a local inn,
a suggestion that visibly offended her, leading her to denounce
him in the strongest terms possible. He responded by slapping her
so hard that she passed out. This led to a great commotion in the
hall, wherein there arose numerous calls for the Negro’s death.
He promptly fled. Pine’s husband, a stout local farmer, was
enraged that his wife might be so mistreated by any other man, let
alone a black one, and even more incredibly a slave. He pursued
Zion on horseback all the way to Boston, where he finally overtook
the offender and engaged him in a battle of fisticuffs in Orange
Street, the city’s main artery. A British officer of the courts
walking by glanced at the boxers, then continued on his way. Within
minutes Zion had reduced Pine to a heap of bloodied flesh and linen.
To celebrate, he mounted Pine’s horse, his own having galloped
off, and proceeded to Cambridge, committing a series of burglaries
of homes and carriages along the way.

Bounty
Items stolen: a bottle of rum, several pieces of jerky, a tricorner
felt hat, nine pounds sterling four shillings, suttler's markee,
some chocolate, twenty pounds sterling, a flask of French brandy,
a pair of moreen small clothes (which did not fit and were thus
discarded into the Charles), a man’s white linen shirt, a
leg of mutton, two weight of salt pork, eleven pounds sterling six
shillings, five pence, a carbine and two pocket pouches, a mAGNIfying
glass, a map of the easternmost British provinces in Canada.

Advertisement
A likely Negro Man aged about 18 or 19 years,
that speaks very good English
of great strength and brawn
sings and plays the violin
sold on reasonable terms by Mr.
Ebenezer Minott, trader over against
the Post Office in Cornhill, Boston.

(There were no takers.)

Spree
Upon settling this most recent plight with the Middlesex County
magistrate, Job Hollis arranged to place Zion on board a vessel
bound for Virginia where he would be sold at auction and his wildness
might finally be whipped or worked out of him. Only under such conditions
would this slave learn respect for the common and hardworking citizenry
in whose colonies he had been fortunate enough to dwell, Hollis
reasoned, and if Zion continued in his ways down there, the penalties
would be swift, and ultimate. Hollis walked Zion, hands bound, the
requisite papers pinned to the slave’s tattered coat, all
the way to Hancock’s Wharf, where the South-going vessel was
to dock. He wished the young bondman a safe passage to the southerly
port. To drown out his master’s voice, Zion began singing.
On this note of defiance, the exasperated Hollis departed. For an
hour or so the slave stood there singing and whistling on the wharf
as the bailor and a customs official sat lubricating in a nearby
ale house. When the ship, a frigate, did not arrive at the stated
time, Zion charmed a Dutch whore strolling by to untie his bindings,
whereupon he set off to find the first loosely hitched horse. As
he ran he proclaimed himself free. Under duress one’s actions
assume a dream-like clarity. An unattended nag stood outside a tavern,
and off Zion rode.

After a spree which stretched from the city of Boston west to the
edges of Middlesex County, the slave played his worst hand when
he committed lascivious acts just across the county line on the
person of a sleeping widow, Mary Shaftesbone, near Shrewsbury. Having
broken into her home and taken violent liberties with her, unaccountably
Zion did not flee the town, but entered a nearby tavern and began
a round of popular songs, to the delight of a crowd of locals and
the horror of the violated woman. The sheriff arrested him without
delay. When he realized the notoriety of the criminal he had in
his hands, he suggested to the local magistrate that, although this
most recent felony had occurred in Worcester County, the criminal
ought to be returned to the General Court in Boston, which had the
apparatus to deal with such evil. The magistrate responded that
given the current worsening political situation in the capital,
it appeared unlikely that the slave’s crimes would receive
rapid adjudication. Mrs. Shaftesbone, demanding justice, or at least
compensation, therefore had word sent to Job Hollis, who was negotiating
the sale of his business in the anticipation of an assault against
Boston’s northern waterfront. The violated widow suggested
a cash settlement, with the proviso that Hollis sell the criminal
out of the colonies, preferably to the French West Indies. Hollis,
who still held title to Zion, agreed to this arrangement, and collected
him, now restrained in wrist irons, from the town jail. They rode
westward, where Hollis’s real plan was to sell the slave down
at Albany to assure a good price and guarded transport down the
Hudson, but on the way, in the town of Pittsfield, they encountered
the Hampshire County sheriff, who claimed to possess warrants for
the Negro from Worcester and Suffolk Counties. In the confusion
arising over the validity, scope and authority of the documents,
Zion seized his master’s musket, knocked both men out, mounted
the sheriff’s horse, and road back eastward, aware of the
tenuous state of justice for blacks in New York State.

Jurisdiction
The following day, British military authorities captured Zion in
an alder wood outside Worcester and placed him in the town garrison
under heavy local guard. But at nightfall he inexplicably slipped
away. He then committed a series of robberies and violent acts throughout
the entire span of the county until his capture on September 17,
1774, again by the military authorities, who pressed to try him
under the statutory laws of Britain, though that country’s
influence was now nearly at ebb tide. The colonial judiciary objected,
and instead rushed this particular case along, despite a growing
criminal and civil case backlog. Problems of jurisdiction always
mirror much greater crises of authority. At Worcester, Zion was
tried and found guilty of rape by a judge who considered the slave’s
affinity for civil disobedience and social disruption to be intolerable
in light of the present state of alarm throughout the region. He
ordered a hanging. Mindful of his rights under the law, Zion implored
the court for a “benefit of clergy.” This the General
Court of Worcester County, after half a year’s consideration
of his records, with documentation from the neighboring courts and
his former owners, denied.

Confession
Just before he was led to the gallows, Zion sang a dirge that brought
tears to the eyes of a townswoman standing nearby. He then gave
a short testimony of his life and self-destruction, which ended
with the following admonition to all bondmen and women of the colony
and of New England: “To all fellow Brothers and Sisters of
Africk and other wise in Bondage in this common Wealth of Massachusetts
take heart that ye avoid Desertion from your Masters good Men and
Ladies and Drunkenness and Lewdness of the Flesh for the only true
Liberty lies in holding fast—do keep the Faith—”

This confession was duly witnessed and indited by an Anglican minister
from Leominster, who included it among his personal effects when
he returned a year later to his home parish outside London. He was
the only one of those present who afterwards recalled it.

Eclipse
On April 1, 1775, Zion, at the age of 21, was hanged in the Worcester
Town Square, surrounded by a sparse gallery of onlookers, among
them the widow Shaftesbone; and the newly-married Sarah Wantone
Fleet and her husband George, of Worcester, a gentleman, Lockean,
and member of a local militia. Also present was Jubal, now calling
himself Cuffee, a free laborer and leader of a Negro brigade in
Boston. Of their response there is no record. The rest of the town,
absent from the proceedings, was preparing, one must suppose, for
the swiftly approaching conflagration.

Theory (Outtake)
“The prevalence of the doctrine of liberty may be accounted
for, from another cause, viz., a false sensation or seeming experience
which we have, or may have, of liberty or indifference, in many
of our actions.” David Hume

Revolution
Eighteen days later fell the events that would lead to the Massachusetts
Bay Colony, joined by its twelve sister colonies, formally declaring
their freedom the following year from the Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland. Among those engaging in the ensuing battle on both
sides were numerous Africans, free and chattel. From this rebellion
were the United States of America born, Beacon of Freedom, Sentinel
of Democracy, exemplary Republic of the New World.

At the conclusion of the war, nearly a decade later, in 1783, the
new Commonwealth, no longer believing the utter possession of human
property useful to its economic and social interests, abolished
legal bondage forever.

(1995). He was a Breadloaf Fiction Fellow in 1998, and a Cave Canem
Poetry Workshop Fellow in 1998 and 1999. (1999)